Featuring articles by Dr. Shalit as well as updates, news and reviews about his many publications.

Sunday, April 16, 2017

The hero and his shadow: psychopolitical aspects of myth and reality in Israel

In an era of faked and alternative news, and when Netanyahu wants the media to be his shofar, a megaphone for him, his family and his government, I was reminded of Moscow in the 1970s, which I mention in the beginning of my book The Hero and His Shadow:

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Psychiatric diagnoses
change in the course of time not only because of increasing knowledge and
accumulated wisdom, but also according to the zeitgeist; that is, the
prevailing collective consciousness. For instance, a biological understanding
of mental phenomena is prominent during periods of conservatism, while
environmental influences are accentuated during periods of greater liberalism
(Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry [GAP] 1983, p. 14; Shalit &
Davidson 1986, p. 61). When one view
dominates, a compensatory one thrives in the backyard. When psychiatry and medicine are ruled by
drugs, biology and technology, there is a complementary interest in alternative
medicine and eco-psychology; when genes shape the soul, the psyche influences
the immune system.

Psychopathology
changes over time, and so, for example, anorexia – reminding us that there is a
fatness of soul behind the fragility of body – takes the place of hysteria,
which used to tell us that there is libido behind the girdle. The anger and the boredom of the borderline
personality replace the guilt and the internal conflict of the neurotic.
Meaninglessness and alienation substitute repression and anxiety.

A society’s
prevailing collective consciousness influences the perception of
psychopathology. While visiting Moscow
in the mid-1970s, I was surprised to see so many people walking in the street
talking to themselves, freely hallucinating.
I realized that private madness did not disrupt the delusion of the
collective, while publicly telling the truth was a malaise in need of hospital
‘treatment.’

Psychologist and
society are interrelated. This
relationship becomes particularly critical when society is governed by a
powerful ideology or Weltanschauung, with a concomitant stress on
adaptation and conformity, or in case of a totalitarian regime. During the
years of the military junta in Argentina, many of those seeking out the
psychoanalytic temenos, the protected space of therapeutic rapport,
needed to know the analyst’s political stance in order to confide in him or her
and to feel protected from the persecuting authorities.

Psychology (and
medicine) can be put in the hands of a totalitarian regime and used for
purposes of interrogation and torture.
The ultimate transformation from healer to killer, the mechanism by
which one is engulfed and participates in a regime’s distortions, is described
by Lifton (1986) in The Nazi Doctors.
On February 25, 1994 – half a year after the Oslo accords, which marked
the beginning of a process which seemed to lead to reconciliation between
Israelis and Palestinians – the physician Baruch Goldstein brutally killed
twenty-nine praying Muslims from behind, in the Cave of Abraham, holy both to
Muslims and Jews. His act was carried
out with the sharpness of a surgeon’s scalpel, in Hebron, that most sensitive
spot on the Middle East map of conflict, and may have caused an escalation in
Palestinian terrorist attacks. Yet, for
both Palestinian and Israeli, all too often it seems that the destruction that
follows when the shadow is cast onto the other, carries less weight than
the burdensome recognition of the shadow within oneself.

The former takes us through the history of the heroic creation of Israel, including the darkest “shadow” behaviors of the Jewish state in the 1948 massacre of the Arabs of Lydda.

In the latter work, Erel Shalit tells us why.

This is no simplistic psychological analysis. The brilliance of this Israeli Jungian analyst is that he offers no easy solutions, plumbing the paradox of the necessary heroic identity of the Jewish state, and yet, around every corner is the shadow of every hero: the beggar, the frightened one, the part of all of us that is dependent on forces outside of our control.

It is also very important to note that Erel Shalit’s book is fascinating reading for anyone interested in the inner workings of the soul. On one level Israel is the backdrop for the author to explore how shadow, myth, and projection work in all of us, regardless of our life circumstance, nationality, environment, or history. It even includes a comprehensive glossary of Jungian terms that has some of the best definitions I have ever encountered, and hence a find for readers new to Jung.

And, of course, for people who are fascinated by the scope and depth of the story of Israel, this is a simply great read. It stands alone, but read as a companion to Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land, Erel Shalit’s Hero and His Shadow gives us The Spirit of the Depths in all its dimension. We may not be able to resolve the Arab/Israeli conflict, but we can learn many things from this brave, complex Israeli author, that we can apply to healing the inner and outer wars in our own lives.

This is a fascinating book. Shalit’s
thesis is that when we examine the psychology of Zionism, we find two parallel
but opposing trends. On the one hand, we see the hero, the warrior, the
pioneer, the fearless man of doing.

On the other hand, we see the shadow, the
dark side, the Diaspora-side, the weak and fearful. We came here with our
shadow. You see this dichotomy between the internal feeling of strength and
forcefulness, and on the other hand a terrible fear.

In order to properly understand Israeli
society and the sometimes strange responses in certain political circumstances,
we need to understand this terrible fear that is hidden within us.

Prof. Yoram Yovell, author and
psychoanalyst.

An outstanding psychological
study of one of the world’s most complicated and fraught political situations.

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Erel Shalit is a Jungian psychoanalyst in Ra’anana, Israel. He is a training and supervising analyst, and past president of the Israel Society of Analytical Psychology (ISAP). He is the author of several publications, including The Hero and His Shadow: Psychopolitical Aspects of Myth and Reality in Israel and The Complex: Path of Transformation from Archetype to Ego. Articles of his have have appeared inQuadrant, The Jung Journal, Spring Journal, PoliticalPsychology, ClinicalSupervisor, RoundTableReview, Jung Page, Midstream, and he has entries in The Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Dr. Shalit lectures at professional institutes, universities and cultural forums in Israel, Europe and the United States.